About Me: You can find me on steam as ZydrateAcademy. There's a few people who use Zydrate as a username so it may take some doin' to find me. You can also find me on Tumblr: zydrateacademy.tumblr.com Don't worry about Tumblr's reputation, my blog is 99% gaming related and little else.

Steam Summer Sale first impressions!

Here’s my current haul;



Not Shown: Watch_Dogs 2. Bought it the day after this screenshot. Currently installing.

I have no particular order.

L4D2; Played it in my Xbox days if memory serves, or at least the first one. Had good times, hard to pass up for 2$. Some people in my gaming community play it so I might install it if someone tried to get some groups going. Otherwise, might be in grey-text limbo for a while.

Quake 2 is only there so that I can one day do a few-episode Let’s Play of it so I can talk about how Quake, Unreal, Morrowind and Starcraft shaped my life back in those 90′s.

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E3 Wishlist edition, and some other stuff.

Thanks to getting paid weekly at this new job of mine in conjunction with them giving me a lot more hours (4 hour shifts are a thing of my past), I have a bit more weekly play money than I expected.

In my last job I was getting anywhere from 220 to 400 (On holiday weeks mostly). -160 for general food and rent and what was left was my play money. But on a weekly basis, the food and rent is lower but I still get around ~250 per week. Take away about ~90 and that’s what I have to play with per week. This means I can typically get game related stuff on a more reliable basis under pretty much the same amount of funding I had before. This is cool.

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Zydrate has a few new games and wants to review some of them.

Now that I have a job, I’ve been getting games on my own again. Here’s a quick rundown of some new games I’ve acquired and some first impressions, if applicable.

Titanfall 2: Basically Call of Duty but with more jumping. The same infuriating hitboxes where I will constantly get enemies down to 10-30% health (And I know this because I can see their bar) and just die pretty much every time. I’ve gotten some cool plays but they’re few and far between and all my titans are made out of fucking toilet paper.

I might write a review of it eventually but it’s very much Titanfall 1 with some new wallpaper. Single Player is good and really has the “weirdness” feel that older shooters used to have. I enjoyed parkouring through this modular-home-processing factory.

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Zydrate talks about Mass Effect's writing.

I’ve sort of mitigated some of the single player “lag” I get from ME:A and I’ve started recording it again on my NG+. It’s a mixed bag, since the lag still happens but at a lesser rate than before and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what settings I had that gave me the smooth run beforehand. I’m wondering if my recording software relates to it but I doubt it, as I had the performance issues even when I wasn’t recording.

Either way, good to pump out some content again. I have some more thoughts on ME:A on a writing standpoint, with a few quotes from a forum thread I participated in.

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Zydrate is having some performance issues with Mass Effect.

Been a while, had to really hunt for the last one of these. I explained on 188 it’s because I’ve been actively recording for my youtube channel so my various gaming exploits are being uploaded daily there. Though not on time, I have 2-4 months of backlog/content to upload. It would still seem redundant if I made a blog post outlining the exact same stuff I did on the video. Half the post would be my voiceover.

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Updated my upload schedule and I break down a trailer.

First, new youtube schedule for my personal channel. Haven’t been doing Cities: Skylines and my Fallout 4 recordings have surpassed them so Fallout will be taking over Friday’s slot. Current schedule is thus;

MON Skyrim
TUE Grab-Bag
WED For Honor
THU Grab-Bag
FRI Fallout 4
Weekends: Grab-Bag

I’m actually working up another backlog which is a mixed blessing and therefore, I may double my output on grab-bag days.
As of this posting I haven’t been in the mood for Skyrim but I do have 22 videos around, so that’s 3-4 months worth of Skyrim content anyway.

Meanwhile, Netflix released a new trailer for an Americanized version of Death Note, which I'm on board with.

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Strap in, there's a lot to say here.

(EmP was cool enough to give me an actual review slot for this so if you wish to leave feedback, I'd prefer it to be there! Enjoy the read either way!)

Andromeda is coming out in a week (as of this writing) and I feel like I want to revisit the franchise. I’ve done a post like this a few years ago when my blog was new but didn’t really settle in on a style and it was kind of garbage with a lot of pointless paragraph breaks.

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